ever-shrinking Earth, but our next major task was to inspect
Then Dave saw a problem. “The outer pane of glass on the tapemeter has been shattered,” he reported to the ground. This was
While the ground puzzled over the glass, and another popped circuit breaker, we finished up for the day. I noticed that I was growing accustomed to weightlessness. I’d experienced the sensation before in the zero-G airplane, of course, but it was very different to live with it full time. At first I had overdone it when pushing myself away from a wall, not realizing the delicate touch needed. It was nothing like a swimming pool; I always felt conscious that I was floating free. I learned to grab parts of the spacecraft to help propel myself. To go under the couch, I would hold on to the front and curl my body right around and under in one movement.
Once I was used to moving quickly and accurately, it was fun to float down into the equipment bay, or up into the tunnel. Unlike Dave and Jim, who would walk around in the light gravity of the moon, I would float for twelve solid days. As my aching back and stuffy head gradually eased, I grew very comfortable.
As well as gravity, I had also lost any sense of day or night. These concepts meant little out there in deep space. I felt no sense of motion either. Earth shrank and the moon grew, but it seemed more like the Earth moved away, not us. Earth shrank so slowly after the first few dramatic hours, it was hard to notice the change. We passed through silent, empty space with nothing going by the windows. No street signs, telephone poles, or trees —as if we were motionless. I could only measure our speed by looking at the instruments.
I could see the bright sunshine of day and the deep black of night—both at the same time. As our spacecraft rolled in barbecue mode, the moon and Earth passed by in the windows, both too distant to create sunrises or sunsets. We created our own time. We were fortunate, because we could stay on Houston time for the whole flight. We’d work their workday, eat meals when they ate, and sleep when they slept. The shades in the windows while we dozed helped to maintain this illusion, while the sun beat relentlessly on our rotating spacecraft.
Time for another meal before we slept. I now felt comfortable enough in space to play with my food. Soup was particularly interesting. On Earth, if I dipped a spoon into soup, it would stay in the cup of the spoon due to the pull of gravity. In space, the soup clung to the spoon in a large ball, held there by surface tension. It didn’t care which side of the spoon it was on. If the soup was too hot, I would let the spoon go until it cooled down. If the ball was too big and I didn’t pick the spoon out of midair very carefully, the soup would break off the spoon and form its own little planet in the middle of the spacecraft.
Overconfident, I pulled out too much tomato soup. It broke free of the spoon and floated, quivering a little in the air currents, a perfect crimson sphere. After our short circuit problems, the last thing I needed was a ball of soup floating behind an instrument panel. I imagined the headline: “Moon Shot Canceled Because Astronaut Played with His Food.” I briefly considered finding a straw and sucking it out of the air. But what if it broke apart into tinier balls of soup? I’d only make the problem worse. So I grabbed a towel. Sensing the air current from the approaching cloth, the soup quivered and moved away as if fleeing in terror. But it stood no chance. The towel engulfed the soup and quickly absorbed it. Good-bye, planet soup. I’d just wasted a clean towel, and some good dinner.
I looked again at the tiny Earth in the window, which looked smaller than my soup ball, before I blocked it out with the shade and headed for my sleeping bag. I felt space adapted enough to leave my head out this time. I slept wonderfully.
CHAPTER 9
EARTHRISE
“We certainly did have a nice sleep,” I reported to Joe Allen shortly after we woke for the third day of the mission. “The moon is getting bigger out the window.” I could see small details with my naked eye, such as little craters I had never glimpsed before without a telescope. The moon was bright and not quite half full. Dave and Jim needed to arrive at their landing site while the sun was still low. Any higher and it would be too hot for their surface equipment to function safely.
The three of us now looked a little scuzzy. None of us had shaved, and we wouldn’t for the entire flight. We were explorers. Have you ever seen a picture of an explorer without a long, straggly beard? We planned to embody that adventurous spirit.
We also decided not to wash. That was fine, because we didn’t need to. We were in the cleanest environment possible—a spacecraft assembled in a spotless room. Our air-conditioning system scrubbed out most of the odors. Jim had brought along a bar of soap, but not for washing. We put the soap inside a wet rag and whirled it around to make the cabin smell nicer.
I did, however, brush my teeth. Plus, of course, we all had to pee and take a crap. Just because we were away from Earth, that urge didn’t change. However, we had a challenge—in space, everything floats.
Peeing was relatively easy. The urine collection device was shaped like a condom, connected to a tube that fed into a plastic bag. Opening a valve, I could flush my urine out into the vacuum of space, where it froze into thousands of crystal flakes. I preferred to perform a urine dump right before we fired our engine. Otherwise, without any other gravitational attraction, the snowflakes surrounded our spacecraft in a large cloud. If I tried to sight stars though the navigational system, I might aim at my own urine and think it was a star. Firing our engine moved us away from the cloud, which, for all I know, is still out there, our personal contribution to the solar system.
Taking a crap was more primitive. We used plastic bags with a six-inch opening, surrounded by a circle of sticky tape. We’d roll down our long johns, slap the bag on and go. Then we’d wipe ourselves and throw in the used tissue, seal the bag, knead germ-killing liquid into the whole mess, and roll the bag into the smallest possible shape. We’d write our name and the flight time on it and float it to a container that held all these gift-wrapped goodies. Later, some lucky doctor back on Earth would get to work through them all.
Three of us shared this tiny space, so there was no privacy. On an earlier moon flight, one crewmember had tried to hold it in for six days and got pretty sick. It wasn’t pleasant to have someone float inches from your face with a bag stuck to his butt. That fragrant bar of soap was a welcome antidote. But we were grungy explorers and we didn’t let it bother us or give it a second thought.
Back to business. Mission control asked Dave and Jim to carefully vacuum the surfaces inside
Before that, we carried out an unusual experiment. Each of us had seen bright flashes when our eyes were closed, and so had crews before us. Scientists believed these flashes were cosmic rays whizzing through space and passing through our heads. We placed the shades in the windows, put on eyeshades, and reported how many flashes we saw in an hour—and there were many. The effect was like flashbulbs going off across a crowded sports stadium as these high-energy particles zapped through our skulls. We reported the many directions the streaks of light seemed to be coming from. Were they striking our retinas or hitting a deep part of our brain, activating our
